Polatis Claims Highest Optical Switch Port Count

BEDFORD, Mass. and CAMBRIDGE, UK, -- Polatis, the performance leader in fiber layer switching solutions, has brought to market the industry's highest port count all-optical cross connect. The new Polatis Series 7000 Optical Circuit Switch (OCS) is a fully non-blocking all-optical matrix switch with up to 384x384 fiber ports and is available immediately. Occupying just 4RU of rack height, the Series 7000 packs 20% more capacity into 40% less space than alternative solutions, while maintaining the superior performance and reliability attributes enabled by Polatis' proven DirectLight™ optical switch technology.

"In response to customer demand, we have doubled the maximum matrix size available from our DirectLight technology while maintaining leading-edge optical performance," said Nick Parsons, chief technology officer at Polatis. "With the addition of the new Series 7000 to the Polatis product family, we can now offer our customers the broadest range of high performance dynamic fiber cross-connect solutions together with open, programmable interfaces to meet the changing needs of today's software-defined networks."

The energy efficient Series 7000 OCS is based on Polatis' patented DirectLight optical switch technology, which achieves superior all-band performance for optical loss, crosstalk and back reflection. Rapid reconfiguration of any or all paths is accomplished in milliseconds, regardless of the power level, color or direction of light on the fiber. DirectLight is a dark fiber optical switch technology with total separation of control and data planes, allowing path pre-provisioning in mesh networks and requiring no knowledge of the fiber traffic to make and maintain fully transparent connections.

The 384x384 OCS only requires the energy consumption of a lightbulb, but can route over 3.7Pb/s of optical traffic, with up to 9.6Tb/s capacity per fiber. In addition, the Series 7000 OCS platform offers a rich set of configurable value-added functions, including optical power monitoring, variable attenuation and autonomous optical layer protection switching.

The Series 7000 OCS combines the new industry benchmark for optical switch performance and matrix size with carrier-class embedded control interfaces that enable seamless integration with any Software Defined Network (SDN) controller. This combination enables Polatis customers to virtualize fiber layer connectivity, enabling reliable, remote and automated provisioning of the physical network layer.